Interview Questions

Interview questions for an Android developer

Android Interview Questions and Answers


(Continued from previous question...)

Interview questions for an Android developer

  1. How do you write apps for multiple screen sizes (no fixed coordinates, use nine patch drawables, favor density independent pixels over pixel).
  2. What are the problems publishing to the market, with the fragmentation of Android in multiple OS Versions and multiple phones.
  3. What is the basic setup of an Android app?
  4. How do you define the user interface? (Mostly xml). (when do you use xml, when do you do stuff in Java?)
  5. What do you have to do to test a new program on a real phone?
  6. What is the result of the compilation process (An apk that bundles resources like image and class files)
  7. What are services? What should be done in a service?
  8. Tell me some strategies for making the most out of your UI? (What will make it snappy? What will bog it down?)
  9. Lets say you have to create an app like an email client, how/when would you get the data from the server?
  10. Explain Intents. What are some examples
  11. What is Fragementation? What can be done about it?
  12. How would you go about making an app work with different languages? (different images and text)
  13. What is coming up next in Android development? What devices are you excited about? (shows how much the candidate is looking to the future)
  14. Explain the differences between the last two major OS releases? (In our case it would be Froyo/Gingerbread/Honeycomb. This will tell how much they know the platform)
  15. What is your debug setup like? (ie: actual device vs emulator, multiple emulators?)
  16. How much experience do you have writing unit tests? What technologies have you used?
  17. What are ways to automate building and running unit tests? (looking for something like "Maven")
  18. How do you make images that scale nicely on Android at different resolutions? (looking for nine-patch)
  19. Explain the lifcycle of an activity? (http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Activity.html#ActivityLifecycle)
  20. What is StrictMode(http://developer.android.com/reference/android/os/StrictMode.html)
  21. What are the ways to store data? Lets say things like
  22. If it is the users first time and you need to show something just the first time?
  23. Cache an image from the internet to be show everytime they launch the app
  24. A list of "favorite" items
  25. When should you use internal vs external storage? What is the difference?
  26. (http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/data/data-storage.html)
  27. Have you done any widget development? What are the main differences?
  28. What causes memory leakes? How can you find them? (http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2011/03/memory-analysis-for-android.html)
  29. If you need to "Notify" a user of something every once in a while, how would you do it? (probably looking for C2DM, then ask:)
  30. How does it work? Have you implemented it before?
  31. Have you rooted your phone? Custom ROM? (This will tell a lot about the candidate, and if they are a tinkerer. I would hope they are under the hood on their phone)
  32. Have you gone to any conferences? User groups? How do you participate in the community? What is your stackoverflow score?
  33. What are your side projects? What have you done for fun? (Huge points if they have a "fun" project in the market)

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